Categories : Electronica, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 4.5 / 5 Reviewer: Nathan Atnikov |
Teen Dream is just the third album in the already impressive career of Baltimore’s Beach House. With each album, the duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally grow infinitely more confident, but it’s hard to imagine how things are going to get much better than they do here. Teen Dream finds them pushing themselves to the borders of their space-y gaze pop, and Legrand’s vocals are noticeably more confident, even in expressing the acute vulnerabilities that she does here.
Washes of reverb guitar, swooshes of synthesizer, and whirlpool background vocals all give Teen Dream an airy presence. It’s an album crafted with subtlety and care that is still big enough to fill whatever room it’s being played in. Legrand joins the pantheon of larger than life front-women, evoking the likes of Nico, Stevie Nicks and Marianne Faithfull. She’s particularly strong over top of the wonky off-key ‘Norway’ and the luminescent opener, ‘Zebra.’ Her bandmate Scally shines on the playfully childlike ‘Used to Be,’ and on ‘Lover of Mine,’ a song that reins in Fleetwood Mac as much as it does The Velvet Underground.
Teen Dream expands far beyond the reaches of the dream pop tag that’s dogged Beach House since day one. While the songs here are definitely contemplative and wistful, there’s an underlying aggression throughout the album that the band has never experimented with before. It’s these subtle movements in new directions that make Beach House one of the most exciting bands working right now.
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